For 50 years, the University of Chicago's Research Institutes--the
Enrico Fermi Institute and the James Franck Institute--have fostered an
interdisciplinary dialogue between scientists that has resulted in some of the
most notable scientific achievements of the 20th century.

The EFI and JFI, founded in 1945 as the Institute for Nuclear Studies and the
Institute for the Study of Metals, respectively, are two of the oldest academic
centers for interdisciplinary research in the world. They were founded by
then-Chancellor Robert Hutchins, who recognized the wealth of intellectual
talent that had assembled at Chicago to work on the Manhattan Project and
conceived of the institutes as a way to retain these world-class scientists at
Chicago.

Hutchins saw the institutes as a way to continue the dialogue between pure
science and technology that had been initiated during the Manhattan Project, as
well as a way to ease the barriers between traditional scientific disciplines.
The mobilization of scientists and engineers to solve wartime problems had
revealed the extraordinary advantages of bringing together scientists from
different backgrounds to focus on problems of national interest.
Interdisciplinary research has since come to be considered crucial to
scientific progress, but at no other university was such a commitment made so
early and so thoroughly.

"Hutchins had seen what happens when you bring really great scientists together
and give them a chance to interact in an interdisciplinary fashion--it had an
enormous impact on technology," said Robert Sachs, Professor Emeritus in
Physics and EFI and former Director of the Enrico Fermi Institute.

Hutchins also sought to bridge the gap between basic scientific research and
industrial technology by establishing the Industrial Affiliates Program.
Industries--24 by 1950--supplied research funds, while faculty members served
as consultants and provided research reports. Gradually, industrial support
dropped off, but government funding stepped in to fill the gap. Today, research
at the institutes continues with funding from a broad spectrum of government
agencies, philanthropic trusts and corporations.

Enrico Fermi Institute

Among the scientists Hutchins hired to staff the new Institute for
Nuclear Studies were physicists and chemists whose names now carry the weight
of scientific legend: Nobel laureates Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey; Maria
Goeppert Mayer and Willard Libby, who would later win Nobel Prizes for their
work at the institute; and Edward Teller. The institute was headed by Samuel
Allison.

In 1955, the Institute for Nuclear Studies was renamed the Enrico Fermi
Institute for Nuclear Studies in memory of Fermi, who died in 1954. The name
was shortened to the Enrico Fermi Institute in 1968.

From the beginning, the Enrico Fermi Institute proved a fertile breeding ground
for scientific ideas. Before the institute had any facilities, members would
gather weekly for what was known as the "Institute Seminar." The range of
topics included nuclear physics, high-energy physics, cosmic-ray physics,
cosmology, astrophysics, planetary science and the abundance of the elements,
among others. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, although he did not become an
official member of the institute until 1954, regularly participated in the
seminars and laid the foundation for the institute's distinguished achievements
in astronomy and astrophysics.

Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1983, made fundamental
contributions across a wide range of topics in theoretical astrophysics until
his death earlier this year. Today, the Enrico Fermi Institute is recognized as
a world leader in both theoretical and experimental astrophysics.

Eugene Parker, the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor
Emeritus in Physics and EFI, predicted the existence of the solar wind--the
stream of electrically charged particles emitted by the sun's corona. Its
existence was later confirmed by his colleague John Simpson, the Arthur Holly
Compton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics and EFI.

Simpson, a member of EFI since its inception, has had more than 35 scientific
instruments launched into outer space on satellites and space probes, and he is
recognized as a world leader in cosmic-ray astrophysics. In 1964, he founded
the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research (LASR), an integral part of
EFI, with funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

In nuclear physics, it was at the Enrico Fermi Institute that Maria Goeppert
Mayer developed the nuclear shell model, the work for which she won the Nobel
Prize in 1963. Mayer, a theoretical physicist, collaborated closely with
institute colleagues in chemistry and nuclear physics, particularly Urey,
Teller, Fermi and her husband, Joseph Mayer.

Urey and his colleagues essentially founded the field of cosmochemistry--using
the abundances of chemical elements in meteorites as clues to the composition
and origin of the solar system. The University has long been the world leader
in this field, a tradition carried on by Edward Anders, the Horace B.
Horton Professor Emeritus in Chemistry and EFI and Robert Clayton, the Enrico
Fermi Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry, Geophysical Sciences and
EFI.

In chemistry, it was Willard Libby who found that ancient organic materials
could be dated based on the abundance of an isotope of carbon, a finding that
had extraordinary implications for fields such as archaeology and paleontology.
Libby won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for this work in 1960.

In theoretical particle physics, the work by Yoichiro Nambu, the Harry Pratt
Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics and EFI, on
"spontaneous symmetry breaking"--work for which he won the 1994-95 Wolf Prize
in physics--has become a fundamental concept underlying much of the work done
today in the field.

The Fermi Institute has a long tradition in experimental particle physics as
well. At the time it was built, the Fermi Institute synchrocyclotron was the
largest accelerator in the world. In 1953, Fermi and Herbert Anderson used it
to discover a resonance in the scattering of pions from nucleons; this was the
first "excited state" of nuclear particles to be observed. Fermi and Anderson's
discovery was a major step toward the realization that nuclear particles had
structure, now described in terms of the more fundamental particles known as
"quarks."

Since then, the cyclotron's size has been far surpassed by accelerators at the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and at CERN in Switzerland.
But Chicago continues to be a world leader in the field of experimental
particle physics--Melvin Shochet, the Elaine M. and Samuel D.
Kersten Jr. Professor in Physics, EFI and the College, served as the
co-spokesperson for the 400-member
collaboration that co-discovered the top quark earlier this year. That team
also included 11 other University faculty members and graduate students.

Nobel laureate James Cronin, University Professor in Physics, heads an
international team of physicists--the Pierre Auger collaboration--who are
making plans to build the largest cosmic ray detector ever built, an array of
detectors that would cover an area the size of the state of Delaware. The
Pierre Auger detector array could detect high-energy particles that slam into
the earth's atmosphere with energies millions of times greater than those
created in particle accelerators.

Each of the institute's 49 faculty members also holds one or more joint
appointments in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Chemistry, Geophysical Sciences,
Mathematics or Physics. The scientific staff also includes numerous senior
scientists, senior research associates, research scientists and postdoctoral
research associates. EFI sponsors the popular Saturday-morning Compton lecture
series and provides Enrico Fermi Fellowships and Robert R. McCormick
Fellowships to promising postdoctoral fellows from around the world.

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Historical photos available:

Then-Research Associate Gerald Wasserberg conducts an experiment to
determine the temperature of ancient oceans by the chemical breakdown of sea
shells. The experiment was directed by Nobel laureate Harold Urey. Circa
1955.

Samuel Allison, the first director of the Enrico Fermi Institute, stands in
front of the kevatron he designed for smashing atoms. Circa 1959.

James Franck Institute

The James Franck Institute, originally the Institute for the Study of Metals,
grew out of the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and began its
mission with a narrower focus than the Enrico Fermi Institute--specifically, to
conduct research on the fundamental aspects of metallurgy and solid-state
physics. Headed by metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith, the new institute
consisted of chemists, physicists and metallurgists.

The spectrum of research has since evolved into the much broader study of the
chemistry and physics of materials--gases, liquids and solids--including the
behavior of superconductors, granular materials and complex fluids.

In 1967, the institute was renamed the James Franck Institute, reflecting its
broader research interests and honoring the memory of James Franck, a chemist
and Nobel laureate who was a leading scientist in the field of photosynthesis.
Franck was a member of the Chicago faculty from 1938 until his death in 1964.

Just five years after it was established, the institute built a low-temperature
laboratory that was, at the time, the largest facility of its kind at any
university. The low-temperature laboratory made possible early studies of
superconductivity--the nearly complete disappearance of electrical resistance
at extremely low temperatures. In 1964, the University constructed an
ultra-low-temperature laboratory, enabling scientists to conduct experiments at
temperatures within several thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.
Theoretical work on superconductivity in the 1950s and 1960s by Leo Falicov,
Morrel Cohen and James Phillips evolved into the studies of "high"-temperature
superconductivity that continue at the institute.

Today, under the direction of David Oxtoby, Professor in Chemistry and JFI, the
institute is part of the national Science and Technology Center for
Superconductivity Research, a consortium formed in 1989 between Chicago, the
University of Illinois, Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern and funded
by the National Science Foundation. Associate Director Kathryn Levin, Professor
in Physics and JFI, heads the Chicago contingent.

True to the interdisciplinary focus of the Research Institutes, many research
areas within JFI straddle the boundary between chemistry and physics--for
example, the work pioneered by Yuan Lee in the 1960s and 1970s on
molecular-beam spectroscopy. Lee, who received the Nobel Prize in 1986, after
he left the University, used crossed molecular beams to measure the forces
between atoms and molecules. Later, Donald Levy, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham
Professor in Chemistry and JFI, and Lennard Wharton developed a supersonic
nozzle to cool large molecules and clusters to study their properties. Laurie
Butler, Associate Professor in Chemistry and JFI, currently uses similar
techniques to study chemical reactions.

Another major area of research in the James Franck Institute is materials
science. Many of the faculty members in JFI are also part of the Materials
Research Science & Engineering Center (MRSEC), funded by the National
Science Foundation to conduct fundamental studies into the behavior of
disordered materials, self-ordered systems and catalysis.

MRSEC director Leo Kadanoff, the John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service
Professor in Physics, Mathematics, JFI and EFI, is a leader in the field of
nonlinear dynamics, particularly in chaos theory and fluid turbulence. Current
work at MRSEC includes theoretical and experimental studies of low-temperature
magnetism and flow in granular materials. The importance of the research in
granular materials to industries such as construction, mining and
pharmaceuticals is again attracting corporate funding to the Research
Institutes.

The 26 faculty members in JFI continue to perform cutting-edge research in a
variety of fields, including non-equilibrium phenomena, phase transitions,
chemical kinetics, laser spectroscopy, semiconductors and polymer physics. The
institute also supports a large number of research associates and graduate
students, and it offers a weekly colloquium series and frequent special
seminars.